Book review: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Sprawling yet intricately interwoven, David Mitchell's latest epic is a heartrending but ingenious puzzle
by David Mitchell
Sceptre
To enter any one of David Mitchell's acclaimed novels is to enter an ornate Chinese puzzle. But once you venture into the world of his sixth novel, - and the vast labyrinth concealed within - you won't want to leave. When you finally do, you won't see our contemporary world in quite the same way again.
This transformative, 600-page genre-bending novel - which is arguably the most hungrily anticipated book of the year and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize even before its release. It begins, conventionally enough, in the British summer of 1984, in the slangy voice of rebellious Gravesend teenager Holly Sykes. By the time you take leave of Holly as an old woman on Ireland's southwestern coast in 2043, you'll have witnessed a battle between two bands of immortals in a chapel in the Swiss Alps and the end of civilisation as we know it.
You'll also have gleaned some tantalising titbits about Icelandic lore and the seven millennia-old Whadjuk Noongar culture of Western Australia. But then, Mitchell's preternatural ability to teleport his readers across time, geography, cultures and genres is just one of a battalion of reasons why his fiction commands such a devoted following around the globe.
Another is he never repeats himself. Yes, you'll find familiar characters and references to his previous novels seamed into the fabric of , like a separate puzzle within an extended Chinese puzzle. After all, Mitchell has declared his novels, which include , (both short-listed for the Booker Prize), and , to be chapters in one whole continuum, an uber novel if you will.
He's even described as his most -y novel yet. But for all its familiar echoes and characters, it's altogether different to his previous works yet like them vast in its imaginative reach. And while its connections to his previous works are mind-boggling, an appreciation of them is not essential to a pleasurable reading of the novel.
Just be warned that you'll be drawn into many confounding detours before the first pieces of the puzzle "click" into place. As for those links to the uber novel, well, that's not for divulging. So think of it as Holly's story, hold on and enjoy the thrilling, almost sinful pleasure of riding on Mitchell's magical, note-perfect sentences into the six decades of life she inhabits.
In 1984, she's a love-struck 15-year-old who adores her new Talking Heads album, , as much as she does Vinnie, the 24-year-old motorbike-riding boyfriend who gave it to her. That is until she discovers him in bed with her best friend from school. But by then she's already had the predictable rupturing row with her hardworking Irish "Mam" about Vinnie's age and her upcoming exams and made the decision to run away from home. She's even said goodbye to her beloved and rather fey baby brother Jacko, as well as the family dog, Newky. To go back home now, well, not only would it prove her Mam was right all along, she'd be a laughing stock at school.
And so Holly takes to the road, ambling into the Kent marshes towards the Isle of Sheppey where she dreams of - and eventually gets - a job picking strawberries. She thinks of her family and the "Weird Shit", aka her memories of "the Radio People", the voices she'd heard as a seven-year-old, until her Mam had taken her to Dr Marinus. The return of "daymares", as Dr Marinus called her hallucinations, along with the niggling worry she may have epilepsy are the only things out of the ordinary on Holly's journey.
She encounters a kind old lady called Esther Little on a fishing pier, who offers her green tea in exchange for some vague notion of "asylum" in the future, a pair of generous anti-Thatcher activists, who offer her shelter, and school friend Ed Brubeck, who also comes to her aid; it's all rather idyllic, picaresque and teenagerish. Or is it? Pay assiduous heed, dear reader: no encounter, no conversation in this novel, however fleeting, is without significance.
It’s altogether different to his previous works, yet like them, vast in its imaginative reach
Then, whoosh! Just as Holly learns of Jacko's disappearance and three nearby murders, one Hugo Lamb hijacks the narration and we're catapulted into the 1990s. Clever, charming and promiscuous Hugo is conning his way through Cambridge. When he's fleecing an old man out of his valuable coin collection he adopts the name Marcus Anyder, when he's scamming a wealthy fellow student, he uses nothing but his charm.
Fearful of poverty and ageing, Hugo lives it up with the wealthy, old-moneyed Cambridge set, sleeps with their girlfriends on the sly, and quotes Machiavelli to shore up his belief that a man who pursues goodness in all his acts "is sure to come to ruin".
Hugo is witty, if caddish company: his melodic, clever riffs on life, privilege and a pub called The Buried Bishop read like highbrow rap. But it's in a pub called Le Croc, while on a skiing holiday in Switzerland with his posh Cambridge friends that he meets barmaid Holly Sykes and falls for her. All looks rosy for the couple until Hugo encounters some characters from Holly's "daymares" and is lured into a Faustian pact.
By now, as terms like "Anchorites", "redact" and "psychosoterica" appear with increasing frequency you'll be asking yourself what kind of genre, exactly, you are reading.
But then you're whisked off to Holly's 2004 wedding bash, a chapter narrated by her soon-to-be husband, where we get closer to her family and the grief they still feel over Jacko's disappearance 20 years previous.
It would be a crime to reveal just who it is she marries, but this chapter, with its domesticity played out in parallel with the horrors of the Iraq war, is like the subsequent chapter narrated by washed-up, globe-trotting novelist Crispin Hershey, as normal as they come. You even warm to this acerbic, lonely and deeply flawed man, who befriends Holly years after we meet him at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, where he mouths off at a rival: "Who on God's festering earth does that six-foot wide corduroy-clad pubic-bearded rectal probe Richard Cheeseman think he is?"
Not that this prevents you agreeing with his editor, who greets Crispin's attempts to pass off his overdue manuscript as "only one-third fantasy. Half at most" with: "A book can't be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant." But by then its too late.
This sublimely well-written "half pregnant" novel has already ensnared you in its vast metaphysical web, just as Holly suddenly finds herself unwittingly enmeshed in an epic war between two groups of immortals, one benevolent, the other predatory.
And that's just it about Mitchell. His unparalleled ability to bring a deep humanity to any fictional realm and make the implausible real, means you'll venture into territory you'd never otherwise go Indeed, the fact that this novel tilts more towards sci fi/fantasy than any of his previous works is by the by.
For is also the most straightforward and grittily real of his works, his enduring themes of reincarnation, trans-migration, privilege, power and predation and, in particular, mortality, reconfigured with a gripping urgency not just in the fantastical realm, but in the oil-starved world where Holly now finds herself, in rural Ireland in 2043. A world so real, so familiar, so beautiful, yet so bereft of the things we take for granted, that it makes Holly's heart ache - and ours along with hers.
Mitchell has declared this book his response to a mid-life crisis, so perhaps it's that which lends this novel its unnerving power. For not only does he tie the myriad threads of his ornate puzzle together with astounding elegance, he sheets home the painful sensation of mortality and of what we mere, inattentive bone clocks stand to lose in this mortal world with devastating accuracy. Read it and weep. Read it and marvel. Whatever you do, just read it.
